Make Your Point > Archived Issues > ELEPHANTIASIS
Send Make Your Point issues straight to your inbox.
pronounce
ELEPHANTIASIS:
Say it "ELL uh fun TIE uh sis."
To hear it, click here.
connect this word to others:
When you consider how elephantiasis means "enormous growth," it's pretty easy to explain why there's an elephant inside the word.
Could you also explain the tiger in paper tiger, the cat in cat's cradle, and the snake in snake-and-ladder?
(I have to admit, I can't explain the cat in cat's cradle, so if you can, please hit reply and let me know! The OED just unhelpfully remarks, "Origin probably fanciful," and it rejects the idea that it might be a corruption of "cratch-cradle" as "not founded on facts.")
Anyway, for bonus points, could you explain the lion in lionize?
For double bonus points, the avis in rara avis?
definition:
You can see how "elephantiasis" literally means "elephant disease." (When you see the suffix "-sis," "-asis," or "-isis," it often means "disease, or a state or process that's like a disease.")
Going back to about 1581, we've used "elephantiasis" to label the disease that causes someone's body part, often their leg, to swell up enormously, becoming so unnaturally large that it looks like it belongs to an elephant. The disease is caused by parasites and is also known as "lymphatic filariasis." I'm not a doctor, though, so don't trust my definition--here's some authoritative information, from the World Health Organization.
Figuratively, elephantiasis is any kind of growth that's so enormous that it seems unnatural or terrible.
grammatical bits:
Part of speech:
Noun, the uncountable kind: "He suffered from elephantiasis;" "Houston suffers from something worse than urban sprawl: urban elephantiasis."
Other forms:
None are common.
There's a noun for the people or things suffering from elephantiasis: they're "elephantiacs."
If you need an adjective that simply means "huge and heavy, like an elephant," you've got "elephantine" and the rarer "elephantic."
how to use it:
Pick the rare, dramatic word "elephantiasis" to call extra attention to just how huge, terrible, and unnatural some growing thing is.
Like with other words for diseases or conditions, including figurative ones, you can say something has elephantiasis, is developing elephantiasis, is a victim of elephantiasis, is affected by (or afflicted with) elephantiasis, is suffering from elephantiasis, or has been cured of its elephantiasis.
You could add an adjective and talk about "urban elephantiasis," "corporate elephantiasis," "elephantiasis of the ego," and so on.
What kinds of things might suffer from elephantiasis, figuratively? Maybe a group, a company, a building, a section of town, a project or plan, an idea, a trend or movement, a philosophy or religion, a lifestyle, someone's spending habits, someone's gambling addiction, etc.
If the word "elephantiasis" is too unwieldy or too dramatic for your sentence, you can scale it back and pick "hypertrophy" instead.
examples:
"It is a tremendous building, saved from elephantiasis by the skill of its architects in blending classical and modern, and its miles of corridors proved a maze at first."
— Alice K. Smith, "Sidelights on Geneva," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1955
"This mental elephantiasis means that when you spill an ounce of gravy, for example, it immediately expands and becomes a vast sea of gravy. It becomes a sea of gravy which surrounds you on all sides and you suffocate in a voluminous sea of gravy. It's terrible."
— Harold Pinter, Ashes to Ashes, 1996
has this page helped you understand "elephantiasis"?
study it:
Explain the meaning of "elephantiasis" without saying "hideous expansion" or "enormous bloat."
try it out:
In the example above from Pinter's play, we saw that "mental elephantiasis" might occur when your own mistake expands enormously, grotesquely, in your mind, until it's all you can focus on.
Adding to that, I think Fiona Apple was singing about the same mental elphantiasis in the song "Left Alone:"
"My woes are granular;
The ants weigh more than the elephants."
Think about a woe, a worry, or a mistake of your own that might bloat into mental elephantiasis if you let it. What do you do to prevent this elephantiasis, or to relieve it or cure it?
before you review, play:
Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.
Our game this month is "Clues in Cobbled Haikus."
Check out the haiku, cobbled together from the work of a famous writer, and see if you can identify the term it's suggesting.
Try this one today:
Cobbled from the work of Dave Matthews, the haiku below suggests which of the following terms: dolce far niente, nefarious, or monstre sacré?
Taste of the good life,
Time, let the hours roll by,
Doing nothing, stay.
To see the answer, scroll all the way down.
review this word:
A. GRACE.
B. ALIGHTING.
C. SHRIVELING.
2.
_____ seems to be _____ corporate elephantiasis.
A. Apple, with its market capitalization of 2.25 trillion dollars, .. afflicted with
B. Patagonia, with its reputation for activism and environmental consciousness, .. blessed with
C. Cellebrite, with its ability to hack into the private data of individuals and governments, .. cursed by
a final word:
I hope you're enjoying Make Your Point. It's made with love. I'm Liesl Johnson, a reading and writing tutor on a mission to explore, illuminate, and celebrate words.
From my blog:
On vocabulary...
36 ways to study words.
Why we forget words, & how to remember them.
How to use sophisticated words without being awkward.
On writing...
How to improve any sentence.
How to motivate our kids to write.
How to stop procrastinating and start writing.
How to bulk up your writing when you have to meet a word count.
From my heart: a profound thanks to the generous patrons, donors, and sponsors that make it possible for me to write these emails. If you'd like to be a patron or a donor, please click here. If you'd like to be a sponsor and include your ad in an issue, please contact me at Liesl@HiloTutor.com.
A disclaimer: When I write definitions, I use plain language and stick to the words' common, useful applications. If you're interested in authoritative and multiple definitions of words, I encourage you to check a dictionary. Also, because I'm American, I stick to American English when I share words' meanings, usage, and pronunciations; these elements sometimes vary across world Englishes.
When you consider how elephantiasis means "enormous growth," it's pretty easy to explain why there's an elephant inside the word.
You can see how "elephantiasis" literally means "elephant disease." (When you see the suffix "-sis," "-asis," or "-isis," it often means "disease, or a state or process that's like a disease.")
Part of speech:
Pick the rare, dramatic word "elephantiasis" to call extra attention to just how huge, terrible, and unnatural some growing thing is.
"It is a tremendous building, saved from elephantiasis by the skill of its architects in blending classical and modern, and its miles of corridors proved a maze at first."
Explain the meaning of "elephantiasis" without saying "hideous expansion" or "enormous bloat."
In the example above from Pinter's play, we saw that "mental elephantiasis" might occur when your own mistake expands enormously, grotesquely, in your mind, until it's all you can focus on.
Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.
I hope you're enjoying Make Your Point. It's made with love. I'm Liesl Johnson, a reading and writing tutor on a mission to explore, illuminate, and celebrate words. |